Excursion to the Vall d’en Joan, Garraf massif. It retains the qualifier of valley, but it ceased to be so at an undetermined moment between 1974 and 2006, since the garbage was dumped there (in the broadest spectrum of that word, that is, without prior recycling) from the people of Barcelona and a large part of the metropolitan neighborhood for 32 years. With 26 million tons not only can a valley disappear, as has been the case, but it is even possible to raise peaks of more than 100 meters high of filth. There are. The excursion, however, is not a trip to hell, with whom this signs and who is in charge of the photos, Ferran Nadeu, like Dante and Virgilio on their way to the underworld after crossing a river of nauseating leachate in Charon’s boat, but On the contrary, it is a coming-out, a party, since 15 years have already passed since that place was reborn. Fifteen years after trucks stopped coming in every day to vomit garbage, in what was once the Vall d’en Joan Bonelli’s eagles hunt rabbits and wild boar mothers walk their young through a fully restored landscape.
A visit like this can be approached from different perspectives. There is one, before continuing with the true purpose of the excursion, that cannot be disregarded without further ado. Under that mantle of land and vegetation that gives the place an appearance of imposing rurality there is a 470,000 square meter raincoat, lest the rainwater seep and ooze through the most unforeseen place toxic sources, and Beneath that colossal capelina there is, depending on how you look at it, a bit of every Barcelona citizen over 15 years of age, hundreds of thousands of mismatched socks, the skeleton of a Sunday chicken a l’ast, soda cans, not exactly clean diapers, the contents of the vacuum cleaner bag, dishes broken in an oversight or in a fight, salivated pipe shells & mldr ; Come on, such an exhaustive compilation of garbage that, here is the disturbing thing, little or a lot contains traces of DNA from those who threw the bag into the container in Barcelona from 1974 to 2006, something like a kind of contemporary Atapuerca.
The purpose of the visit organized by the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona, that is, the administration that once accepted the challenge of putting an end to that monumental environmental nonsense, is not to invite the hiker to those crazy reflections, of course, but to show how that A large and festering geographical wound has finally healed after a final injection of 32.5 million provided by the Agència de Residus de Catalunya and, moreover, faster than imagined, since nature has already taken the reins in that place. It has not happened this time, and it is a pity, but weeks ago, on a preparatory visit for this coming-out, the delegation of technicians and politicians was received in the parking lot by a fox, which can be taken, with a wide sleeve, as a bioindicator that things have been done well. Foxes have been the quintessential robbagallinas for centuries, that is, they have roamed rural environments, and this particular specimen, which even allowed itself to be photographed poking its snout between two cars, may not steal chickens here, but it does hunt rabbits That there are in abundance to the great joy of the raptors too, but in all fairness it seems that once it has been given a snack by the guards of the landfill and that is something that a fox never forgets.
There has been no fox on this occasion, but during the detailed explanations provided by Joan Miquel Trullols, director of the WBA at the head of this (sorry, but it is the most appropriate for the case) ‘brown’, a hawk has flown majestically over the heads of those present. Trullols himself has suggested a reason for this bucolic scene. The large land cover that crowns the old landfill has more the appearance of a large poorly maintained golf course than of the vegetation that is more typical of the Garraf natural park, pine trees and shrubs. That is so deliberately. In the absence of shelters, rabbits, which are already known to proliferate when allowed to dominate their instincts, are a mouthful that attracts raptors. Come on, nature has made its way with the occasional push from the offices of the AMB.
La Vall d’en Joan is today rather a slightly sloping plateau, but it is also a prodigy of technology keeping a leviathan of 26 million tons of detritus under control. The engineering that hides under the 64 hectares of the landfill is, in fact, the crucial thing about that place. On the one hand, there is the network of pipes that drain about 200,000 liters of leachate every day, in other words, dirty water. The very weight of the waste has been squeezing the mountains of garbage for years like a lemon of miasmas, a true environmental horror that has been domesticated in such a way that a treatment plant separates the wheat from the weeds and water comes out on one side suitable for irrigation and, on the other, material to be treated in a suitable plant for it.
Those nauseating waters so far filtered through the subsoil and occasionally reached the sea. When the 1974 authorities had to choose a place for the landfill, they selected the worst location of all possible, a mountain that due to its geological composition is a gigantic Gruyère. From now on, with the landfill sealed, a surveillance and control phase begins and, over time, they hope, including the recovery of the quality of the waters that bathe the Garraf.
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The other technological watermark has to do with the breath of that monster, those biogas emanations. On a small scale, what happens in the Garraf on a daily basis is what happened millions of years ago on Earth and that over time gave rise to the large gas deposits with which today the homes of the first world are heated. Then, the decomposition of organic matter accumulated in the subsoil giant fuel bags. The landfill is, from this point of view, a whole chemistry lesson that could well be shown to high school students. The landfill not only exhales biogas, but that respiration, once redirected to a small power plant, produced in 2020 a total of 19,250 megawatts per hour and it is expected that this 2021 the record will be beaten and 25,000 megawatts will be reached by the end of the year , translated into the language of comparisons, the equivalent of what some 3,218 households consume during a year, and, in addition, with green energy.
This is an excursion, in short, that does not leave you indifferent and that, incidentally, as pointed out by the vice president of the WBA, Eloi Badia, is everything a plea in favor of being responsible when separating garbage at home. Organic, for example, should never end in a place like this, as it did for 32, because under that green cloak that looks like ‘mission accomplished’, terrible things are still happening. Organic matter ferments and, between pressure and other causes, can ignite. This is what is happening, in fact, right now. There is at least one incandescent bag of waste in the heart of the Vall d’en Joan, in front of which the only thing that can be done is to prevent oxygen from reaching you from outside. In its own way, it can be said that the old Garraf landfill is alive. Even when? There’s no answer.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com